He had fallen into the error of all liberals: the belief that men are prepared to reform themselves, that good will attracts good will, that truth has leavening virtue of its own.
If you spend your whole life waiting for the storm, you’ll never enjoy the sunshine.
It costs so much to be a full human being that there are very few who have the Love and the courage to pay the price. One has to abandon altogether the search for security and reach out to the risks of living with both arms. One has to embrace life.
In a longish life as a professional writer, I have heard a thousand masterpieces talked out over bars, restaurant tables and love seats. I have never seen one of them in print. Books must be written, not talked.
One has to accept pain as a condition of existence. One has to court doubt and darkness as the cost of knowing. One needs a will stubborn in conflict, but apt always to the total acceptance of every consequence of living and dying.
Man is a creature who walks in two worlds and traces upon the walls of his cave the wonders and the nightmare experiences of his spiritual pilgrimage.
There was no cure for the human condition because every man read the present and plotted the future in the light of his own past.
And I’ve always worked on the principle that if it interests me enough to write about it, then it must interest a lot of other people.
Well I travelled quite a lot in the east, and one of the things that impressed me greatly was the buddhist notion of the continuity of things, the wheel of life which is what we’re talking about, the ever turning wheel.
Once you accept the existence of God – however you define him, however you explain your relationship to him – then you are caught forever with his presence in the center of all things.
There are still things I want to do but they’re not necessary for me to do. I’m not clinging to anything that I can’t open my hands and let go.
I look out this window and think this is a cosmos, this is a huge creation, this is one small corner of it. The trees and the birds and everything else and I am part of it. I didn’t ask to be put here. I’ve been lucky finding myself here.
All institutions are prone to corruption and to the vices of their members.
You know one of the causes of modern despair is the fact that we have had proposed to us, from various quarters, an impossible perfection.
If God be God and man a creature made in image of the divine intelligence, his noblest function is the search for truth.
The fact is that the learning process goes on, and so long as the voices are not stilled and the singers go on singing some of it gets through.
None of us is guaranteed against failure or corruption of any kind; witness what’s going on in the world in this moment, the follies of human nature and the failures of human nature.